It's Not Religion

I've repeatedly said the issue is not the religion per se - it is the underlying beliefs fomented, with or without religion:

Prejudice: 'our god is the real god, yours is false' - is extremely prejudicial and, however much a few religious people might fight it, this is an overwhelming product of religion. Which is also NOT to say that religion has exclusive access to creating prejudice.

Ideology: Ideology IS prejudice, human behavior is too complex to be fully captured by a set of rules. Any set of rules about human behavior is going to be harmful when the RULES themselves are placed above all else.

Tribalism/Us-versus-Them/Nationalism/Patriotism: These are more forms of prejudice - this is where religious and political ideologies both similarly exploit base human nature.

There is nothing wrong with a proportioned sense of pride about ones nation but no nation, government, or persons should be placed above open criticism. The point is that this "Us" mentality is highly exploitable and must be guarded against.

Credulity: that belief without evidence is greater than empirical facts and reasoned conclusions. 'God hates homosexuals, look here, he commands that you put them to death - we don't do that anymore but it is still an abomination - so no marriage for you'. No evidence of the harm this does to others can ever exceed the internally ridged inculcated mind holding that ignorance is greater than knowledge. See Also: Truthiness

Miracles/Supernatural: I don't have to take my child to the doctor, I'll just pray like it says in the Bible because I KNOW that miracles are real. There are many other harmful products of this belief as well (exploited by faith healers, psychics, and revivalists, .... just to name a few).

False Morals: the promulgation of poorly considered ethical foundations such as the Golden/Silver Rule (which only works if everyone agrees on the desired/undesired behaviors). Don't suffer a witch to live, stoning people to death, death for apostasy, genital mutilations, and so forth [varies]


The counters to these are skepticism, conservatism of action (in the sense of a proper sense of self-doubt as our condition is one primarily of ignorance), liberalism of thought (in the sense of throwing off prejudices, valuing education, freedom, and reform, openness to change in the face of new knowledge, guarding of civil liberties), and a scientific approach to knowledge that demands claims be supported by appropriate evidence and recognizes the propensity of the human mind for cognitive biases, illogic, and factual error.

A Day In The Life: Evolution

Few things on Evolution that I've found interesting:

Ethan Hein'a post on visualizing the time scale of evolution.

Christie Wilcox in Scientific American Evolution: The Rise of Complexity

The Value Of Atheism

The following tweet was put out by Adam Baldwin the other day (note: he frequently deletes his tweets so the reference is no longer valid):

@adamsbaldwinAdam Baldwin

What have #atheists ever accomplished with their #atheism that would make their#atheist opinions worthy of respect?

http://twitter.com/adamsbaldwin/status/11173114775863296


Adam Baldwin put out the challenge above asking essentially, what did atheism ever do for humanity. Of course, he worded it in a very negative and sophistic way.

My response is as follows:

The value of atheism is that it is a rejection of the FALSE religious claims of just cause for genocide, genital mutilation, stoning to death, torture, and hate (etc). Atheism itself (the rejection of theism) provides ABSOLUTELY NO BASIS for such obviously abhorrent actions.

So, you might ask, how does a secular person justify 'morality'. The answer is: EXACTLY THE SAME WAY EVERY OTHER SINGLE PERSON HAS EVER DONE SO.

You learned your fundamental moral behaviors LONG before you knew anything about the details of the bible (and, in fact, a lucky few among us do not have any poisonous religious claims polluting their mind yet they are moral beings as well). You ALREADY knew it was wrong to hurt others because you FELT it. And the few people who don't feel this way are the psychopaths and sociopaths in the world. It has NEVER been demonstrated that a non-belief in god is correlated with a lack of empathy in any way. On the other hand, religious up-bringings HAVE been shown to have PTSD-like effects on children.

We humans have 'mirror' neurons which enable us to virtually experience what others actually experience. When you see someone else harmed you (tend to) imagine that you feel what they are feeling (unless you are mentally damaged). This is the underlying basis of our empathic drive and forms the fundamental basis for our sense of morality. Neuroscience is making incredible progress in this area of research.

Secondly, humans have the ability to share our ideas as a collective group. Through various agreements (implicit and explicit) we have established rules for social order that result in mutual support and protection of groups that we identify with (and to our great collective misfortune, also leads to conflicts with groups that we do NOT identify with).

Finally, because we are able to observe, reason, and make determinations for our individual and collective well-being (e.g., I'm hungry, I need to eat -- or my family is hungry, I need to hunt) we are also able to make similar determinations about our behaviors and their consequences in other areas of life.

Go back 10,000 years and imagine that you are a stranger entering a village and you start acting erratically (yelling, jumping around, acting unusual, foaming at the mouth, etc). The villagers might well kill you in self-defense.

It's not immoral to act strangely and yet people would have KNOWN not to do it. They don't need a 'god' to tell them how others are going to react to things.

You don't have to actually DO a thing to make a fairly good assessment of this result and adjust your behavior accordingly, if you are familiar with the customs and culture.

The problem you immediately run into when you try to use the Bible to justify some kind of absolute moral foundation is that #1 the 'laws' for people clearly changed over time (don't eat pig, ok to eat pig -- cut off foreskin, don't cut off foreskin -- god commanded slavery in the OT, slavery tolerated in the NT, and now is slavery moral or immoral?) and #2 the rules for 'God' are obviously different than those for men, if moral law was ABSOLUTE it would, by definition, apply equally. Yet, it is said to be immoral to commit murder but it's ok to commit murder if God orders it as he did of Abraham, as he did at Jericho, as he did to the many tribes, as he did of the first born of Egypt, and as he did of nearly the entirety of creation in the Flood.

Some final thoughts...

Do you think it's morally ok to CUT OFF a womans entire clitoris? Some religions^[Islam] claim that you must, how do you propose to prove them wrong? Does the Bible say you can't do that? It ORDERS the followers of Judaism to cut off part of the male penis so obviously god doesn't think too poorly of such practices and he utterly fails to mention any prohibition on doing this to women.

And Slavery existed in Jesus' time but he never spoke out clearly and condemned it. And the Bible was used for thousands of years to Justify slavery and the poor treatment of jewish people. Only very recently (historically speaking) did religious leaders FINALLY grow a fucking conscious and help to speak out against slavery.

These issues just show the complete ridiculousness of religious claims. Unless you can overcome all those objections then you have no basis to claim the superiority of religious claims.

I don't think it's moral/ethical to cut ANYTHING off any infant (unless there is a clear and established medical need). That goes for foreskins, clitorises, extra fingers or toes (unless they present a medical danger), penis on a hermaphrodite, or ANYTHING else [see also Circumcision]

Addendum: I would like to add here, that by rejecting rigidly, closed-minded claims of religion immense progress has been made in the sciences while the Catholic Church was busying burning scientists like Giordano Bruno at the stake and imprisoning Galileo Galilei. The Church had an odd love/hate relationship with scientists, they were sometimes supporters of those who would stay within their strict bounds. But it is that very factor of an a priori boundary of inquiry that is at the heart of the problem and when you compound that with a bloodthirsty penchant for the most extreme forms of torture you can imagine for those who dared think for themselves then yes, I do find fault. How many Popes in a row ordered murder and torture be done in Christ's name? And is even ONE acceptable? Imagine if an atheist organization existed today that had tortured people for 1000 years? Would ANY organization get away with that other than a religious one?

So I say those who have rejected these false religious beliefs have indeed done many wonderful things for mankind as a product of that rejection, or to use Baldwin's phrase "with their atheism". AND they didn't do it out of fear or bribery.

Thanks For The Memories

Collection of articles on memory:

• New Protein Synthesis Not Essential To Memory Formation
• 'Erasing' Drug-Associated Memories May Stop Drug Addiction Relapses
• Memory Trick Shows Brain Organization
• Scientists Decipher The Formation Of Lasting Memories
• Master Controller of Memory Identified
• Enzyme Enhances, Erases Long-Term Memories in Rats; Can Restore Even Old, Fading Memories, Say Scientists
• Sleep Makes Your Memories Stronger, and Helps With Creativity
• Novel Memory-Enhancing Mechanism in Brain

How might we discern Objective Moral facts?

If objective moral facts exist then they would be facts of the matter regarding an action, behavior, or thought (I will just use 'behavior') to being 'right' or 'wrong'. Morality does not apply to all behaviors, this is an important and key observation.

There is no proof that objective moral facts actually exist. It could be that right and wrong is entirely an opinion held by a being capable of holding such thoughts. But I would like to present my viewpoint on why objective moral facts MIGHT exist, and a brief consideration of what they might look like. PLEASE note that this is NOT a proof of objective morals, it's merely an exploration of how they MIGHT exist on the nature of the concept of Morality itself (as being distinct from other concepts).

First, what I do mean by "distinct from other concepts". If I said Morality was the distance between planets you would instantly recognize that I was NOT actually talking about Morality. So this concept of distance between planets is not part of the distinct concept of Morality. So what IS the distinct concept of Morality? This is the real question we're trying to address. And our problem is that even WE don't really know what we MEAN when we talk about Morality. All we know is that it's something our brains DO, but the details are fuzzy. But we can identify at least some things that are not part of the concept, and I'll show that we can identify some that are. The question then becomes, on the properties necessary for Morality to be a distinct concept - can we then deduce any Evaluative moral statements that must apply (if you removed them then Morality would no longer be a distinct concept).

Any human endeavor that proposes to ask a question about something requires an Evaluative statement upon which to base any measurements (formal or informal). We often only have a very fuzzy idea of what we mean when we ask such questions. We do this about thousands of things and don't really think anything about it. Is it an objective fact that pressing the right buttons on a telephone will let you speak to your friend in New York? Of course it is? What is your yardstick for measuring this? Well, you push the buttons and you hear your friends voice and later on your talk to your friend in person and they confirm, yes that was me on the phone. Something physical happened in the universe that we could measure - but the thing we're measuring is completely arbitrarily defined by us posing the question in the first place. So what you observe & measure is determined by the very Yardstick that you define. What is a second? Is there an objective fact of a second? No there isn't! We measure a second against an atomic process, when it happens 9,192,631,770 times we call that a second, that fluctuation is the objective fact of reality, 1 second is a quantity of that measurement. We used to measure seconds against rotations of the Earth but we found that wasn't actually just measuring time, it was measuring all kinds of other things that made it (very slightly) unreliable! We had a poor yardstick, we found a better one.

So whenever we want to actually measure something, we must must have an evaluative statement that provides the CORRECT yardstick by which to measure it. We can make due with poor yardsticks, but they will give fuzzier answers.

Is it 'hot' out today? Is an evaluative statement but there are a lot of hidden assumptions. 'hot' relative to what? Most often the person asking would be asking relative to the temperature range in which humans are comfortable. And it isn't JUST temperature, humidity would play an implicit role as well, wind speed, and many other factors would all come into play.

Now imagine that I ask "is it wrong to initiate force against another human being"? This is a question that demands an evaluative statement about Morality by which to measure it. Let's look more closely at Morality in detail, and see if we can deduce any facts independent of our mere intuitions about it.

Built-into the very concept of Morality is the necessity that the agent either be capable of performing the action (a deontological/duty moral) or of not performing the action (or avoiding it). Morality simply doesn't apply to falling rocks, the rocks are never considered immoral. If we removed culpability from the concept of Morality it would not be meaningful.

So we CAN identify at least some of the necessary concepts that are part of Morality. Two other important concepts are intentionality and awareness of the consequences.

Someone who has suffered major brain damage may no longer be able to control their actions, if they harmed someone in such a state we wouldn't hold them morally culpable. They would lack the necessary properties that are inherent in the notion of Morality. They would be acting irrationally.

Neurological studies comparing parts of the brain believed to be responsible for empathy show marked differences between dysfunctioning psychopathic brains and normal brains. So I think that empathy is very likely a necessary property to possess to be considered Morally culpable. I'll grant this one is on weaker ground than the others but I think it is not difficult to imagine how this plays a critical role.

What about the ability to learn? We do not consider infants to be morally culpable, they do not demonstrate the necessary levels of cognition and understanding. They don't seem to be able to help what they do. As they grow more capable it seems rather self-evident that they must learn. A being that could not learn, I do not believe, could become morally culpable, any more than the brain damaged.

What about a brain that can learn, but cannot apply that learning to future behaviors? They must be able to apply what they learn to future behaviors.

So there are a number of things that seem to be inherent and necessary to the concept of Morality:

(1) culpability
(2) intentionality
(3) aware of consequences
(4) rationality
(5) empathy (and other intact emotions)
(6) ability to learn
(7) ability to apply knowledge to future behaviors

It certainly seems to me that if any of things are missing then the very question of morality would be irrelevant for that object (or being).

So now, let reconsider our question - on these necessary properties of Morality, "is it wrong to initiate force against another human being?"

If we do, a morally sufficient agent would be culpable, they would have intended to cause harm, they would be aware of the consequences (they would know how others are likely to feel and how they themselves would feel if the situation were reversed; as well as what others might do to them if they are caught), they would have had an opportunity to have learned and apply this knowledge to their action. Would a rational being then act in such a harmful way?

The question is, can you remove the Evaluative statement "It IS wrong to initiate force against another human being" from the concept of Morality and leave the concept intact, or is that statement necessary on the facts of Morality itself?

Perhaps you can, perhaps not, but these are the types of statements that would need to necessarily hold given the inherent properties of a distinct concept of Morality.

Now imagine the set of ALL POSSIBLE Evaluative statements that could possibly relate to Morality, if you can remove every single one of them and leave Morality intact then there are no objective morals. If any of them are necessary on the facts of Morality, as a distinct concept, then those would be objective moral facts.

I do NOT think the properties I've listed here are, by themselves, sufficient to sustain any objective moral facts. I've only tried to point how I think that such a thing could exist and what they might look like and how we might eventually discern them. Before we can do any proving, I think that we would need to understand what mechanisms in our brain processes Morality and understand what the necessary properties of those structures are.

I do think that modern neurological studies are showing extremely strongly that there is a (common) neurological basis for human morality, so even if there are no objective moral facts there is almost certainly a phenomenological basis for morality. I'll try to expand on that in the future (or dig up some good resources).

Establishment Clause

This is a placeholder post on notes/quotes related to the Establishment Clause and the Separation of Church and State:


Thomas Jefferson's 'Notes on the State of Virginia' where it talks about Religion (which you can get free online):
http://books.google.com/books?id=-KlbAAAAQAAJ&vq=religion&dq=thomas%20jefferson%20notes%20on%20the%20state%20of%20virginia&pg=PA261#v=onepage&q&f=false

Jefferson wrote in 1802 on the CHURCH AND STATE, Wall of separation: Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions. I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof thus building a wall of separation between Church and State R. to A. Danbury Baptists viii, 113. (1802)
http://books.google.com/books?id=icGh3NxREIIC&pg=PA142&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U0HMqsni0U4HXihV0iPjm6BPFqKNg&ci=61%2C493%2C464%2C293&edge=0

William F. Jamieson writing in 1873 'The clergy a source of danger to the American republic':
Notwithstanding the Constitution affirms that no "religious test" should exist, its framers were still fearful that some loop-hole remained through which danger of a religious character might come to the nation. Hence, at the very first session, of the first Congress, the first amendment to the constitution was made:
"Congress shall make 'no law respecting an establishment of religion, of prohibiting the free exercise thereof," etc.
With what jealous care did the Fathers of this Republic guard against the interference of religionists with the affairs of the State? With what solicitude did they lay the foundations of this Nation? They were aware of the despotic power of Religion, whenever, and wherever, it assumed control of human affairs. They apprehended danger to the Republic by the ever meddlesome clergy. They feared the very calamity that has come upon us—religious dictation in civil affairs. Is it not suggestive that the first amendment^ to the Constitution of our country should be on the subject of religion 1 The clergy never accepted the situation, and throughout our whole history have labored to inculcate opinions at variance with the principle of Self-Rule. In order to get the reins of government in their own hands they propose to blot out this first amendment, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances," and put the following, which I copy from the aforementioned pamphlet, in its place: "The free exercise of the Bible-revealed Christian religion, the observance of the Christian Sabbath, and everything requisite to the promotion of gospel Christianity, without denominational preference, shall be congressionally sustained and supported; and the freedom of the press and of speech, unless in matters of obscenity and profanity, shall not be abridged, or the rights of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Let that principle be carried out, and freedom of speech and of the press would be at an end in this country, as they are in nearly all lands in the old world where Christianity and other equally despotic systems of religion bear rule.
The author of the pamphlet entitled, "Christian Amendments of the Constitution of the United States" reports Dr. Bushnell as saying, "From the Atheistic error in our prime conceptions of government has arisen the Atheistic habit of separating politics from religion." But that sagacious and noble Statesman, Thomas Jefferson, rejoiced that religion and the state were completely divorced in the new nation.

Lief H. Carter's 'An introduction to constitutional interpretation: cases in law and religion' (1991), which contains an entire chapter on this subject.

And, further, ask yourself how a Nation who had declared man was "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" could then enshrine into law the slavery and utter possession of one man by another. One is an ideal, the other is the reality. This Nation has failed AGAIN, and AGAIN, and AGAIN, and AGAIN, to uphold the ideals upon which it was founded. That is no excuse for failing to right those wrongs.

There have been MANY instances were the government has been involved in the establishment of Religion - but those past transgressions are no excuse for continuing them into the future.

Festivus 2011: Airing of Grievances: Christianity Edition

I was posting on another issue elsewhere and I ended up listing my primary 'beef' with Christianity from a political viewpoint.

1. Violent and Hateful Christian Identity movements, pro-slavery Christians, KKK, etc
2. Christians attacking Women's Rights (on nearly every front but predominately their reproductive rights to their own bodies)
3. Christians attacking gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other Rights (including their RIGHT to marry and enjoy the SAME SECULAR benefits heterosexual couples do; also their right not to suffer hateful discrimination)
4. Christians attacking science and pushing absolute nonsense like I.D. which is nothing more than Biblical Creationism; this includes stem cell research, evolution, abiogenesis research, research funding in general.
5. Christians attacking the separation of church and state (and yes I know EXACTLY those words aren't in the constitution, they are the EFFECT of the establishment clause and Jefferson made this extremely clear in his writing - this amended EXISTS because Christians were KILLING EACH OTHER over their religious squabbles, forcing religion OUT of a matter of state proved vastly superior).
6. Christians LITERALLY brainwashing their children by sending them to these absolutely horrific 'Christian' camps where the kids are subjected to tortuous levels of emotional abuse that cause the children to break down emotionally and force them to 'accept Jesus and confess that they are sinners' (a horrible thing to force upon a child, FORCING them to believe that they are irredeemable sinners who aren't worthy of life except by Grace - it is just inexcusable - Child Abuse of the worst sort, willful and intentional.
7. Christians who believe God wants them to war with other nations or justify their war, hatred or prejudice on God/Christianity/Bible
8. Christians who attack sex education and birth control, which directly results in increased unwanted pregnancies, abortions, STDs, and numerous other health and social problems.

These are some of the major areas where I see Christian beliefs causing real emotional and physical harm in the US.

Religion, useless or lifebelt?

RE: The Evolution of the God Gene

For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.

This is a false dichotomy and, in fact, Daniel Dennett has repeatedly spoken about how well-adapted Religion is for the human mind. Hitchen's speaks of religion as man's early attempts at Science and Philosophy, which it almost certainly was. FACTS never pose any problem for those who care about the truth. In fact, I have studied ancient, animistic, and shamanistic religions for some time because I am deeply interested in this process myself. I also think that these insights can be beneficial to modern humans - our desire to experience the Awe of the cosmos is a drive we share very much in common with all ancient people.

Religion also was and is celebration, community, politics, control, and a consolation to suffering. It plays the role of many different things, to different people, at different times. But this article commits the fallacy of composition when it attributes the beneficial attributes to the Religion and not the component parts, such as philosophy and science. Those are the elements that gave our ancestors a leg up. It was their study of the cycles of nature that enabled them to better predict the future and develop agriculture & cultivation, animal husbandry, navigation, weaponry, fire, and some measure of control over their environment. They simply tied everything together with a celebration of Nature.

The article also incorrectly assumes that all things produced by evolution are automatically and eternally beneficial when this is clearly not the case. Changes that increased survival at one point can be the very change that results in the extinction of a population at a later date. One example, far too many religious people these days are seeking a culmination into the end times - this was not a feature of ancient religions which were based more around the cycles of Nature.

It is this feature that concerns atheists today. We want to keep the community, ethics building, comforting, charitable, philosophical and scientific components and dump the no longer useful parts, which have millions clinging to false and demonstrably harmful beliefs (that condoms CAUSE AIDS, that gay people are evil, that women are not equal to men, etc).

Finely-Tuned, an inconsistent claim on Christianity

William Lane Craig (and other Christian apologists) often present a Fine-Tuning argument which basically alledges that the universe is so incredibly fine-tuned for life that the only way to explain this is to appeal to a God-creator of the Universe.

Never mind that actual physicists, such as Victor J. Stenger, strongly disagree with this assessment, in A Case Against the Fine-Tuning of the Cosmos.

But as we know from Genesis 9:12-13, it is claimed that God establishes the Rainbow as a sign of his covenant:

And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.

But, as we have discovered through modern science, the rainbow is intimately tied to the precise laws of physics at the Quantum level that produce the precise refraction and reflection properties of water droplets which produce a Rainbow. So, for God to have established the Rainbow in the age of Noah as a sign of his covenant with the Earth, the laws of physics would necessarily have had to have been substantially different prior to this event. And since life existed prior to this time, on Christianity, the laws of physics we observe today cannot be so Finely-Tuned as life apparently existed in a world in which water droplets had neither refraction nor reflection, the propagation of photons must have been profoundly different than we find today.

So this claim is internally inconsistent (or must resort to Special Pleading), as well as failing to be established as factual as Stenger, et al. have shown. And furthermore, until we have a well established final theory of Everything, such claims are extremely tenuous at best because they extrapolate WELL beyond the realms in which current theory has actually been tested.

This is the intellectual equivalent of someone in 1850 observing how well Newton's Law of Gravity fits the observations (in the energy realm in which it had been tested to that point) and concluding from that, that Nature was non-relativistic. Nor today can we assume that the premises of Relativity are PROVEN by the success of the Theory when there are unknowns (how to integrate the theory with the Quantum, and what happens at extremes of energy that are inaccessible to us). These extrapolations from the Theory serve as TESTS of the theory; to misinterpret them commits a very grievous error.

Craig is hiding his semantic game behind numerous implicit premises that are not at all sound assumptions.

Separate but Equal, Together but Apart

I posted this as a comment on the following blog... it's still "awaiting moderation" so I'm going to toss it up here for safe-keeping. Feel free to join in the fray :)

Re: http://potluckbloggers.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/obamas-america-a-place-divided/

“We need to stand together to solve our problems. / Is it election day yet?”

Your vision of “standing together” is interesting. What it seems you mean from these words is that everyone needs to believe as you do and if they don’t, they must be marginalized by voting them out. Can you even see the hypocrisy in these two statements?

Most all want fair and free elections – the issue is not the mere requirement to show ID, it is how it can be used as a tool of disenfranchisement and you KNOW this is the issue being debated but you choose to ignore the facts and instead resort to fallacious and emotional appeals.

I mean honestly, terrorism means we have to show ID to vote??? Your argument is completely without merit, it’s not logical in the slightest. All you’ve done is strewn a few facts here and there and pasted them together with random talking points.

And your facts are extremely skewed and biased; I challenge you to post these facts in comparison (if you can produce RELIABLE sources for data post 2007 that’s fine with me, but I don’t believe that such exists, even the CDC has not finalized 2009 data).

(1) number of US deaths from Domestic terrorism (non-islamic), 2001-2007
(2) number of US deaths from auto / slip&fall accidents, 2001-2007
(3) number of US deaths from Tylenol, 2001-2007
(4) number of US deaths from heart / cancer / Tobacco / alcohol, 2001-2007
(5) number of US deaths from Islamic terrorism, domestic and foreign, 2001-2007
(6) total US deaths, 2001-2007
(7) percent of US morality attributable to Islamic terrorism, domestic and foreign

I want to know just exactly how severe this “Islamic threat” is here in the US, so give me ALL the data and let’s see where it stacks up.

[and I'm not suggesting we ignore it either, the point is that you and others distort the facts all out of proportion -- you ask me to give up constitutional rights on a threat that is smaller than that presented by Staircases, Bathtubs, and pain relievers]

You can pretend to minimize what you believe the effect of such a Bill will be in the US but you CANNOT deny that this has been exactly a tool of disenfranchisement used in the past – the concern is very real. What you failed to do is justify a belief that this cannot and will not be used as such a tool in the US. And you would have to make this case in light of clear evidence that people ARE trying to disenfranchise voters (on BOTH sides to be fair).

The charge is not that YOU personally are a racist, but there are those who are pushing for these policy changes who ARE doing so purely out of prejudice and hatred.

“and if we just leave it alone it will make the proper corrections” — a lovely denial of the plain facts of history.

And if you seriously think Obama is a socialist then you need to get a dictionary… not ONCE has he proposed that the means of production be turned over to the government. Regulation and social support systems are NOT, in and of themselves, socialism. You are guilty of the slippery slope fallacy here.

“democrats are racists too” — lol you are joking right? Prejudice is hardly a unique property of Republicans. OF COURSE democrats are racists too. Democrats used to be THE racists, the Republican party practically began because of the racism of Democrats who were pro-slavery (predominately southern Christians who used their Bible as a justification for slavery).

And Abraham Lincoln is a personal hero of mine. The Republican party of the time FREED the slaves. But that all changed over time and by the election of 1912 there was nothing left of the Grand Old Party. A mass exodus occured electing Thomas Woodrow Wilson as the 28th president of the United States. From that date forward the Democrats have greatly diversified and adopted more liberal and progressive policies. And it is exactly this effort AGAINST prejudice that appears in the Democrat movement that has pushed the Religious Right over to the Republican party.

So yeah, there is still a LOT of racism and prejudice everywhere – but it cannot be denied that a heavy concentration currently lies with the Religious Right in the Republican party. They are practically frothing at the mouth over the idea that two people of the same sex might get the same civil rights as two people of opposite sex. Why are they so preoccupied with the sexual activities of others?

Where do you see this level of open hatred anywhere else? It’s not ALL republicans to be sure.